We’ve all heard of sleep walking, sleep talking, and even sleep eating, but now there’s a new late-night culprit – sleep e-mailing, or zzzmailing, as it’s now been dubbed.
The first reported case, as told by the University of Toledo to the Telegraph, involved a 44-year-old woman getting up two hours after she’d gone to sleep, logging on to her computer, and e-mailing her friends to invite them to a wine and caviar party. The woman didn’t realize what she’d done until a friend accepted her invitation.
What this says to me is that e-mail use has clearly become a deeply-ingrained habit. The constant connectivity offered by email and PDA tools has people logging on so frequently that we’re even starting to do it in our sleep.
While people have been sleepwalking for ages, reports are only now beginning to surface about sleepers undertaking complex, detailed tasks – such as logging onto computers to send emails. Egan, an internationally renowned e-mail productivity expert, finds this new trend disturbing because, even though this may be an amusing anecdote, this says something very real about the extent to which e-mail has become a part of our lives.
We need to take steps to break the habits of e-mail addiction and misuse. We need to take charge of our inboxes instead of letting them take charge of us.
To read the complete Telegraph article, visit http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3743289/Zzz-mail-What-happens-when-sleepwalkers-go-online.html.
